Lots of Fish in the Sea
by Omnicat
Summary: Hydra had Bucky on a lab table for god knows how long and never discovered his secret. Cue Agent Carter walking in on it pretty much the moment he and Steve make it back to camp. / aka the one where Bucky Barnes is a merman and once you've lived through your single worst nightmare, 'chasing tail' puns are a close second
1. Bucky and Steve

Sequel to "Guppy Love" (story id 10474899). This story can stand alone just fine, but it'll probably be more fun if you've read that one first.

For those of you coming back for round two after reading "Guppy Love" expecting another Steve/Bucky-only piece, I'm sorry! I hope you'll give this new ship configuration a try nonetheless, though. :)

**Lots of Fish in the Sea**

_Chapter One: Bucky & Steve_

Peggy discovered the drawings by accident.

She and Steve had departed with such haste he hadn't bothered cleaning up after himself, throwing his things at his cot thoughtlessly while searching for a jacket and proper boots. The little notebook he'd been doodling in when she found him had landed open on the bed, cover up. When she picked it up to put it and his other things away somewhere it would make the USO tent look less like he'd fled or been abducted from it – for all the time _that_ would buy them – it slid closed. She only opened it again to smooth out some pages that had folded in on themselves.

Apparently the book had opened to a drawing of a male mermaid sprawled indolently across two pages. The boy fish – round-cheeked and youthful still, though his upper body had a young man's build and the mischief glinting in his eyes and curling around his mouth was anything but child-like – was beautifully detailed and anatomically plausible. Something about the face, atypical in a way that just didn't seem to fit Steve's drawing style, gave Peggy the feeling it must have been drawn from memory.

_Could this be...?_

On the other side of the page, hiding behind two blank pages folded over the bottom half of the mermaid's tail, was a drawing of Peggy. Just as large as the mermaid, of her pristinely in uniform, feet apart, pistol raised and ready to fire, hair flying.

There were angel wings sprouting from her back.

And his self-portrait was a dancing monkey. Oh, _Steve_.

**I-oOo-I**

Nothing had ever made Steve's heart sink quite like asking for James Barnes and getting the words 'isolation ward' for an answer. They were followed by 'no-one's ever come back from it', but Steve barely even heard those. Nor did he need to.

Hydra didn't treat ill or wounded prisoners, they executed them. An isolation ward could only mean one thing.

No – this was _Bucky_. Two things.

**I-oOo-I**

"What happened to you?"

"I joined the army."

"Did it hurt?"

"A little."

"Is it permanent?"

"So far."

"...you don't have one of those, do you?"

Steve had the chilling realisation that while his initial fears may have been misguided, he might have to ask Bucky the same thing.

**I-oOo-I**

"I volunteered for the procedure," Steve was quick to point out once all four hundred odd freed soldiers were walking, driving, or being driven away from the Hydra camp. The guilty 'who, me?' look on Bucky's face at that was better than the glances he'd been shooting Steve so far, like he'd already drawn all the wrong conclusions, but it obviously didn't put him at any real ease. "So I could join up. It fixed my lungs and everything. Don't you go worrying about _me_, Buck, I knew what I was getting into. It was worth it."

Bucky examined Steve's new body the way Steve must've done his all those years ago, when he first looked at his best and closest friend and saw something he didn't recognize and which shouldn't be possible.

"I wouldn't be here right now if it wasn't for this. Neither of us would," Steve whispered, at a loss.

"Yeah, okay," Bucky mumbled absently. He wouldn't look Steve in the eye.

**I-oOo-I**

It started raining during the trek back. Steve didn't think anything of it, only angling his helmet a little deeper over his eyes to keep the drizzle from blowing into them.

When he adjusted his helmet for the umpteenth time and looked over at Bucky to see how he was handling it, Steve did a double-take. He'd forgotten – Bucky didn't _have_ a helmet. Instead, he stared straight ahead through his third eyelids, unblinking.

Hell – Bucky, like many of the rescued men, didn't even have a _jacket_.

The serum kept Steve from cooling down too much, and Bucky obviously didn't feel the cold like a warm-blooded creature anymore. But _Bucky was hovering at the tipping point between human and not human_. If the two of them, half man and half myth, were soaked through that thoroughly, how must the rest of the troops be faring?

"Buck."

Bucky startled severely. Rainwater flew from his hair as he whipped his head around, wide-eyed and with a white-knuckled grip on his rifle. He looked a thousand miles away, and a thousand miles from human.

Steve gestured to his eyes. Frowning, Bucky blinked – and blinked again.

"Oh." The membranes retreated, and Bucky squinted back at the troops through the rain. "They must be freezing," he whispered. "I hadn't even realised..."

"Yeah, me neither."

Bucky shot him a puzzled look. But then understanding dawned, and he scanned Steve's body again, like he was only just remembering all the impossible things he'd already seen it do.

"We should –" He gestured vaguely over his shoulder. "Hypothermia. A lot of them weren't in the best condition to start with."

"Yeah," Steve said.

They turned, together, elbows brushing.

**I-oOo-I**

Steve was on Bucky like a hound on a scent the moment he fled the medical tent. "Hey, were are you going?"

"Swimming," Bucky said, voice clipped.

"I'll come with you," Steve said.

"No need."

"Yes want."

"Don't you got somewhere to be?"

"Not right now."

"Then you will real soon, trust me. Better stay put where the brass can find you."

"If they really want me they'll find me, until then I'm coming with you."

"Why, you think I'll disappear downstream and desert the army if you don't keep a leash on me?" Bucky snapped.

For a moment, Steve faltered, halfway to a dead stop. Then he quickened his pace. He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Not until now. I _thought_ I'd be your spotter." He studied Bucky's face closely, trying to see past the hollow eyes and the bruising and the weight-loss and the sweaty pallor. "_Should_ I be worried?"

"I don't know, should you?"

Steve frowned. "Buck –"

"I really don't know, Steve," Bucky said with a bark-like little laugh just his side of hysterical. He wouldn't look anywhere but straight ahead. "You tell me. Am I the kind of guy who runs away? Because that's all I can think about right now. 'I haven't gotten away yet, I haven't run far enough. I _can't_ get far enough.'"

Steve caught his elbow, but Bucky shot him such a heart-stoppingly helpless look, he encountered no resistance when he pulled away.

They ducked between tents and into the woods. Nobody stopped them. Bucky's jaw worked like he was rolling words around on his tongue, testing, tasting, but he didn't speak again until they saw the glitter of sun on water through the trees ahead.

"They're under my skin, Steve," he said hoarsely. Steve could see his hands shaking. "They put something in me. I need to get out of this _body_ before... before..."

"_God_, Buck," Steve breathed. "What did they do to you?"

Bucky shook his head once, hard, and started to strip. "I need a swim. Come on."

Unhappy but knowing better than to push, Steve turned away and settled with his back against a tree, one ear turned the way they came. Bucky waded in, and changed, and swam.

This wasn't how they were supposed to reunite. This wasn't what was supposed to happen when they went to war. They were supposed to fight the good fight, and preferably live to tell about it, but if they must die then preferably only after they'd made a difference no matter how small, and when they crossed paths again they were supposed to be able to smile no matter what horrors had been burned into their retinae since they laid eyes on each other last, and the joy – the relief, at _least_ – of finding each other alive was supposed to be able to _last_.

He and Bucky weren't supposed to slide off of each other like the wrong ends of a pair of magnets, never really getting through. They were supposed to be stronger than this war.

What had Hydra _done_ to him?

"You know, Buck," he called out after a while, his heart radiating pain into his throat. "They're finally letting me do what I signed up for. I'm staying. But if you wanna go, I won't stop you."

Bucky's lips parted in shock, but then his expression shuttered. He stared at Steve for a long moment, eyes blank. Then he ducked underwater without a word and didn't surface again.

Steve sat, and stared out across the still water, and tried not to scream.

Tried to figure out what he'd be screaming if he did.

He had no idea how long it was before he heard footsteps approaching. He jumped up, whirled around, and exclaimed louder than necessary: "Peggy!" Wait, no, bad. "Agent Carter. Ma'am."

"Captain Rogers," she replied primly, stepping over a fallen log in a pair of stained boots he was pretty sure didn't go with her skirt-and-tie uniform. "I've been looking all over for you. What are you doing all the way out here?"

"Sergeant Barnes wanted to go for a swim. Figured I'd keep the Germans off his back while he was at it."

Peggy raised an eyebrow, and her lips curled as if something about that was terribly amusing. "Indeed. Where is he now?" she asked, looking towards the water.

Bucky surfaced as if on cue.

Steve almost swore out loud in front of the lady. "Bucky, stay back! You're not decent."

Bucky approached anyway. "Who's this?" he called.

"Agent Carter of the Strategic Scientific Reserve," Peggy said. "I supervise all SSR operations."

Nowadays Steve's eyesight was as superhuman as the rest of him, which he dearly hoped meant Peggy's eyes weren't keen enough to notice Bucky's gaze unsubtly raking over every inch of her.

He cleared his throat. Loudly. "Agent Carter helped me through boot camp so I could get the serum, too."

"Is that what happened?" Peggy said, at the same time Bucky's expression darkened and he asked, "You helped turn him into a lab rat?"

Peggy's eyebrows shot up.

The bottom dropped out of Steve's stomach. "Bucky, please. We've been over this."

"Over what? Your stupidity is your problem, not mine." He swam so close to them a coppery gleam became visible under the water.

"_Bucky_," Steve hissed, eyebrow-gesturing frantically.

Peggy kept the results of her intense scrutiny of the both of them to herself and only asked, "Are you sure you should be in there? The medics were complaining you ran out on them before they could clear you for release, let alone prolonged exposure to the elements."

A harsh, humourless sound left Bucky's throat. The hair on the back of Steve's neck rose before he even spoke.

"Wanna compare your results to Hydra's, huh?"

Peggy frowned. "Beg pardon?"

"_Bucky!_"

"_Steve!_" Bucky mimicked nasally.

There was a wild curl to Bucky's lip and a fever-bright look in his eyes, and it leeched all the warmth from Steve's body –

"Maybe I _should_ desert the army if the SSR is part of it, 'cause from where I'm standing it looks like it's just Hydra in a different coat."

...but some detached, pragmatic little voice inside also said: _There we have it. Finally._

Then that voice evaporated.

Because Bucky closed the last distance to the bank and dragged himself into the shallows. His shoulders left the water. Then he heaved up his chest, his hips – and what should have been his legs.

Not even the transformation could hide the evidence of what had happened to him. Bands of near-black bruises crossed his arms, stomach and chest, narrowly missing the gills that had opened up between his ribs, and where a coppery fish tail had replaced his legs, the same restraint marks showed as strips of raw and darkened flesh rubbed clear of scales, and angry-red, swollen fins.

Steve didn't know whether it was the bruises or the look on Bucky's face or the tail (Bucky, Bucky no, _she can see your tail_) that upset him most.

At least Peggy didn't scream.

"Gonna strap me back to the table, huh?" Bucky asked, voice trembling and breaking. "Like you strapped _him_ to a table?"

"What are you doing?" Steve whispered, horrified.

Peggy looked from one to the other, eyes wide and lips parted. "_You,_" she said to Steve, inexplicably. "This is why –" Then her jaw snapped audibly shut, and she collected herself in the blink of an eye, her eyes sharpening to daggers. "Not all of... _this_ is the result of Hydra's experiments, is it?"

"Hydra didn't have the first fucking clue about 'this'." Bucky gestured wildly down at himself and laughed, or perhaps choked. "It's funny, you know. It's fucking hilarious. Do you know what _happens_ to my kind when we're found out? What could have happened to my family and everyone like me if the fucking _Nazis_ – ? All my life, the only thing I've ever been afraid of was people finding out and ending up in a laboratory somewhere, getting cut into pieces for this. But when I got there, Hydra didn't even see it!" Every new inhale and exhale was wilder and more ragged. "What's the point in hiding it anymore when I end up like a pin cushion for the mad scientists anyway?"

Steve couldn't take it anymore and jumped into the water.

Bucky's breath hitched; his face crumpled.

Tamping down on his culminating panic, Steve pulled him into his chest, held him tight and let him cling, murmured in his ear because _slow deep breaths, Buck, come on, you're hyperventilating, slow deep breaths or you'll faint like a pearl-clutching old lady_. They'd done this the other way around so many times, talking their way through like it was an asthma attack was instinct.

Better than admitting that clearly what Bucky really wanted was to cry like a baby.

While Bucky kept Steve's jacket clutched tight and his eyes shut tighter, his forehead pressed to Steve's chest and his mouth open in a grimace, fighting for control of every breath, Steve watched Peggy watch them. The super soldier and the merman. The product of her people's hard work and the legend come alive. Like the Cube. Like any given number of Schmidt's lunatic ravings. Like equally many things the Allies had no defence against if they turned out to be true.

Agent Carter was inscrutable.

"Sergeant..." she started eventually, frowning. Bucky had himself pulled mostly back together, but her voice didn't even seem to register. Then, more authoritatively: "Sergeant Barnes!"

The results were instantaneous.

"Ma'am," Bucky croaked, wide-eyed and snapping to attention as best he could with no legs.

Peggy's expression softened. She knelt down to eye level with them.

Somehow, her words were still a surprise.

"You've been through hell, Sergeant, and only a madman would expect you not to be affected by the experience. But the world is full of mad men. As such, I am going to pretend this never happened. I promise you that the SSR will never know of your – condition." Peggy's lips thinned. "As much as I would like to pretend the words 'deserting the army' didn't leave your mouth either, though, I'm afraid you've got something of a point there. The Nazis may not have noticed your secret, but they were looking specifically for the effects of whatever it was they were doing to you. If you're put on medical leave and get sent back to civilization for observation and recuperation, or the brass decides we need to get to the bottom of Hydra's actions and your anomalous survival of them, they'll be looking for _any_ abnormalities, and who knows _what_ they'll find."

"What are you saying?" Steve asked cautiously.

"That I saw neither hide nor hair of either of you when I went out to look for Captain Rogers. It's very tragic, but Sergeant Barnes may well have drowned out here. Overestimated his strength after his recent ordeal."

Steve's jaw dropped.

"Oh, hell no," Bucky said. He scrubbed a hand down his face real quick and conjured up a smirk. "Getting in over his head is Steve's line. I just turn into a fish sometimes."

"The serum put an end to that," Steve pointed out automatically.

"See, there we go. Thinks he's fucking invincible. I can't leave him alone for five minutes, I swear."

A crooked grin split Steve's face before he even noticed.

"Besides, I already told a bunch of the guys I can't swim," Bucky said. "They'd think I drowned on purpose. No way am I gonna be remembered like _that_."

"Well then." With a small, quick smile, Peggy straightened back up and primly smoothed down her skirt. "In that case, I distinctly recall you _walking_ into camp, and let it never be said that I can't read between the lines. Your legs can... come back, correct?"

"Yes."

"Very good. Then I'll see the two of you back at camp." She looked them both in the eye in turn and raised an expectant eyebrow. "Within the hour? Colonel Phillips is growing impatient, Captain."

"Yes, Ma'am," Bucky said.

Steve could only nod.

Peggy nodded. "Excellent. It was an honour to meet the man Captain Rogers speaks so highly of, Sergeant Barnes, but next time we cross paths, I do hope you'll be wearing more clothes."

And she marched off, no looking back.

Steve and Bucky stared after her and kept staring long after the sound of her footsteps had faded.

"Did that really just happen?" Bucky asked eventually.

Steve pinched him.

"Ow." He shook his head, wonder in his face. "_Damn._ Are Brits even real?"

"That's Peggy for you," Steve said with no small amount of pride.

"_Nice._"

Steve made a face but didn't have it in him to protest.

"Now help me out of the water and get me my clothes before I eat you, ya shrimp."

That, Steve did protest. By getting his mouth on Bucky first and kissing _hard_.

**I-oOo-I**

True to her word, Peggy treated their meeting by the lake as if it had never happened.

"You must've really impressed her somehow. I don't think she'd tell even General Eisenhower she was honoured to meet him," Steve said, because a little pang of jealousy was no reason not to.

The sun was setting. The camp was permeated with the smell of hot food. Steve and Bucky's stomachs rumbled in unison, but Colonel Phillips had sent Bucky back to medical while he talked to Steve, and they could both use a breather.

Steve could _see_ Bucky bite back something bitter – he didn't know her, after what she'd witnessed he probably thought it was pity – but he found enough game somewhere to ask, "So what exactly did you tell her about me?"

"Only the good stuff."

"There you go, mystery solved. You know, between you and her I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't just shout my secret from the rooftops and instantly become the most popular guy in town. Clearly mom's generation used up all the horror stories and heartbreak. What could possibly go wrong?"

"'Chasing tail' jokes?"

Bucky cuffed him upside the head for that. "Hey, does Captain America have an adorable animal sidekick yet?"

"I think a fish tank would take up too much room that could be better used by chorus girls in tiny skirts."

"Ooooh, good point. When's your next show?"

"_Never._"

"Steven Grant Rogers, is that any way to treat your best guy and a POW? Shame on you."

**I-oOo-I**

The sordid details came out eventually. Steve and Bucky didn't _get_ to bunk together, they _had_ to bunk together. Perks of Steve's nebulous rank and bringing back almost trice the number of men this camp alone had lost. Their own guys, Brits, French, a black platoon, a Nisei squad...

"Needles, pal," Bucky sighed into the privacy of their shared tent. His elbows were on his knees, and he raked his hands through his hair, bowed nearly in two. But he hadn't purposely avoided Steve's eyes since he dried up and changed back, and Steve breathed just a little easier for it. "And then tests, and then more needles. It hurt like – like they'd poured acid in my bones, and it screwed with my head, and the food tasted wrong. I don't know what they were after, Steve. _I don't know._" His hands tightened against his scalp.

"Hey, hey, shhhh, it's okay," Steve murmured, coaxing Bucky's fists out of his hair. "It's okay. It's over now, you made it. You're fine."

"_For now._ Who knows what all that stuff did to me, is _gonna_ do to me?"

_Nothing. I won't let it happen,_ Steve wanted to say.

But he already had.

**I-oOo-I**

'_Nobody's ever come back from it.'_

Nobody but Bucky.

This being Hydra, and Hydra having already tried to retrieve Erskine's formula once, _and_ the Red Skull's personal presence being the – ha – red flag it was, everyone's obvious first guess was that they had been trying to recreate the super soldier serum in the back room while the main factory produced their scientifically impossible super-weapons.

"And your asthma was gone, just like that?" Bucky asked. "Christ, you got tall. Caught up on your stunted growth too, huh? Always knew you had it in you." He pinched Steve's biceps. And his pecs. "Look at these hooters you grew!"

Steve swatted at his wandering hands. "It cured my lungs, my heart, my ear, everything, and if Doctor Erskine's predictions are correct, I'm never getting sick again. I didn't even know it was possible to feel this..." He shook his head. "– this _alive_."

Bucky smiled at him like all his own dreams had come true – however briefly. _He_ still looked like death warmed over.

"So the procedure's biggest risks _that we know of_ were the chance that Doctor Erskine got something wrong and accidentally created a poison instead, the strain on the body during the transformation, and the possibility of turning into a fucking _demon_," Bucky summarized.

"Well, that last one was what the strict selection process was for."

"And this is just what you guys know from what the dearly departed doctor would actually risk writing down, and the grand total of two recipients of the serum the SSR knows of. One of whom being a Nazi bigwig who took an unfinished version without telling the doc about it, and the other a punk with every medical problem under the sun who ran off with the circus rather than get that shit studied."

It was almost enough to make Steve regret it, even though he knew that was the last thing Bucky meant. "Yeah."

"So even _if_ what they shot _me_ up with was some bastard cousin of Doc Erskine's super juice, we _still_ don't really know anything about what to expect."

"I know one thing for sure." Steve looked Bucky in the eye very earnestly. "_If_ you got the serum, now or ever, you'd _never_ become like Schmidt."

_If_ Bucky had gotten the serum, it didn't seem to have worked. Peggy had been right on the money: the SSR checked, thoroughly, for any sign of increased performance. And then Steve and Bucky privately checked again in his other body. No strength of ten men for Bucky, and no strength of ten mermen either.

But the universe had a twisted sense of humour, so the fact that Bucky wasn't human was probably the reason living through his worst nightmare hadn't meant the death of him like it had for all the others subjected to Arnim Zola's tender mercies.

Whatever Hydra did, though, and however it worked, it may not have succeeded in any way they could discern, but it hadn't killed him either. Not on the table, not during the march, not at camp and not in London. He got better, not worse. The bruises faded. Colour returned to his skin. He gained back most of the meat on his bones.

Even the paranoia gradually ebbed away, and the memories stopped replaying behind his eyes. By the time Steve popped the question – "You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?" – _you ready to run_ towards _Hydra?_ – he was already pretty sure of the answer.

And Bucky smirked, sure enough. Tired and sharp-edged and dark like Steve had rarely seen it back in Brooklyn, but _Bucky_ all the way.

He was gonna be just fine.

**I-oOo-I**

"You don't like music?"

"I do, actually. I might even, when this is all over, go dancing."

"Then what are we waiting for?"

Oh, yeah. Definitely gonna be fine.

**I-oOo-I**

Eventually.

London sleeping arrangements had been blissful ignorance to Steve, but once they were back to sharing a tent on missions, Bucky woke Steve up in the dead of night a couple times, thrashing and whimpering. In the near-total darkness, Steve watched him rub his arms and dig in his nails to try and pry his mind away from phantom needles and straps until he had enough.

"Hey, Buck, do you trust me?"

"Oh, god, now what?" Bucky asked, laughing tiredly.

"Do you?"

He sighed. "Of course I do, pal. What do you want?"

Steve crawled out of his blankets and into Bucky's. "For you to focus on me and think of absolutely nothing else."

And he started mouthing at Bucky's neck.

"What are you – ?" Bucky pushed him away. "Oh, goddammit, Steve, don't you dare. What, it's only wrong to keep doing this when _I'm_ the one running out on _you?_ Agent Carter and her feelings don't deserve the same respect my girls did?"

Steve thought of getting kissed and caught and shot at in the basement. "Stop thinking so hard, you dolt. Not that I'm not flattered, but you're severely overestimating what's going on between me and Agent Carter."

"Yeah, and my name's Nancy. Buddy, you still got a punch coming for not telling me about you and her before you started eating my face that first day back."

Steve thought, again, of getting kissed and caught and shot at in the basement. His throat constricted in an eerie imitation of half a dozen of his old ailments, but. _But._ He also still had to stop himself sometimes from putting his hands all over Bucky to make sure he was really okay and Steve really hadn't lost him for good.

"Buck, it's fine." He pressed his forehead to Bucky's jaw and his hand to his heartbeat. "It's fine. Let me do this for you."

For a moment, Bucky leaned into the touch, sighing as if in longing. Then Steve felt him smile, and Bucky pushed him out from under his blankets, and said sadly, "Not out of pity, pal. You're never gonna find another woman like Peggy, don't throw that away."

"I don't want her if I can't have you too. I don't want _anything_ if the price is losing you," Steve said. He felt flayed open. He'd never admitted that before. He'd never _believed_ that when he felt it before.

"I'm not going anywhere. You love her, Steve," Bucky insisted. "I can tell. And I'll bet my left foot it's mutual. Come on, man, she could be the one."

Steve steeled himself. "I only just met her. I've loved _you_ all my life."

Silence. Then, coldly:

"Because I'm all you've ever _had_ to love."

Steve recoiled as if struck.

"Don't use bullshit logic like that if you can't stomach having it used against you," Bucky scolded. "Now go back to sleep. You wanted to distract me? You did it."

And he rolled over, back turned to Steve.

Slowly, Steve rolled the other way, back into his own blankets.

The next morning, Steve was woken up by a noise of surprise and Bucky's face pressing into his neck. He kept his breathing even and stayed very still. At some point while they slept, Bucky had wrapped around him like an octopus, and despite everything he'd said the night before, he held on tight for as long as he could.

**I-oOo-I**

They – the two of them, together – had been so simple once. Steve remembered being sixteen and watching Bucky twirl girls he sometimes didn't even have to ask for the name of around the dance floor like a pro, because just because they couldn't dance together didn't mean Bucky couldn't put on a show for him.

Steve also remembered being twenty and watching Bucky's eyes glaze over and his smile turn wide and awed whenever Sadie Woodhouse winked at him.

Thing is, Bucky wanted a family. Kids. As many as he could feed. He wanted to be a father and teach his small fry to sing and swim and catch fish with their bare hands, just like his mother had taught him and his sisters when they were children. Loving Bucky was like breathing, but a house as full and warm as the one he grew up in was something Steve just couldn't give him.

_Supposedly_, Bucky had never actually fallen _out_ of love with Steve, he just... didn't hold himself back when he found himself falling in love with a woman _in addition_. No – 'supposedly' was unfair. Sore as he could get about it, Steve trusted Bucky more than that. One single person could hardly give you _everything _you needed to be happy. For men like Bucky that just meant there would always be a choice to make.

It was a conundrum.

It was the way of the world.

Steve, for his part... well, Steve had never been quite as optimistic about his odds with the ladies. By the time the war rolled around, he wasn't even sure if he got that dull ache in his chest thinking about it because it was something he wanted, because it was something he _would_ have wanted if not for Bucky, or because it seemed like yet another thing he'd been born too unlucky to ever have whether he wanted it or not.

When Bucky didn't have a girl he was serious about, Steve told himself there was no point sinking time into potential marriage candidates, because he had him, and even if Bucky was all he had, he could make do, he'd never needed much. He was probably too queer to do right by a wife anyway, and _children?_ What Bucky had to pass on was beautiful; all Steve could give his offspring was a list of health defects as long as his arm. Once Bucky _did_ fall in love with a woman – and it was 'once', not 'if', not anymore – Steve told himself Bucky's friendship wouldn't be a consolation prize, nothing Bucky was willing to be to him would _ever_ be a consolation prize, and being the funny uncle to Bucky's kids instead of a father to his own would just leave him more time to do other great things with his life.

Then there was Peggy, and so much for those lies.

And _then_ he almost lost Bucky for good, and wow, that got complicated fast.

Bucky took to Peggy a lot better than Steve had to winking Sadie Woodhouse. Or any of Bucky's girlfriends, if he was being perfectly honest. Which didn't help matters. In any way. At all.

Because Bucky was beautiful, and Peggy was gorgeous, and on their own they had always done all kinds of funny things to his head. Now, _together_, they short-circuited every scrap of good sense Steve had. Their dark heads close together as they bent over a map in matching dress uniforms; that time Bucky shocked everyone in the bunker by surprising a bout of full-bodied laughter out of Peggy; the single, covert glance they exchanged when the other Howling Commandos started ragging on Bucky for not knowing how to swim; teaming up against him and practically finishing each other's sentences trying to convince him that 'no Steve, you can't Steve, even for you that's an impossible feat, Steve, try that and you'll die, Steve. oh. you went and did it anyway. _goddammit_, Steve, I swear if I didn't love you so much –'

They filled Steve with so much affection and happiness and courage and pride, and such an intense desire to watch them necking and maybe draw a picture or two (or twelve) of Bucky sucking on Peggy's girls and the looks on their faces when Peggy wrapped a hand around Bucky and Peggy throwing her head back as she sank down on Bucky's lap, and –

It probably said all kinds of sad, sad things about his self-esteem. 'I want the both of you like I've never wanted anyone else in my life, so how about you two hook up with _each other_ and... don't mind me, I guess.' Because clearly the solution to not being able to have his cake and eat it too was to give the whole damn cake to someone else. _Clearly._

Well, that or adultery, but don't even get him started.

Steve settled for just one blue picture; Peggy's hair obscuring her features and Bucky's face buried in the crook of her neck, their hips slotted together.

He stared at his handiwork for long minutes. Slid his thumb along the curve of Bucky's back, up Peggy's thigh from her knee to the place where Bucky's hand dug into the fold between her leg and behind, across the back of her hand buried in his hair. It smudged his careful lines and shading.

Didn't matter. He tore out the page and burned it.

To replace it, he drew a cartoony sketch of a big, blond gorilla in spotted caveman fur with a dark-haired angel and merman over his shoulders. The gorilla carried them toward a cave entrance illuminated by a candle set on a dinner table decked out for three. Peggy and Bucky were giving each other the thumbs up behind his back.

And Steve sighed a lot.

**I-oOo-I**

Once again, Peggy saw the drawing by accident. Yes, really. Not her fault she had such freakish luck.

That being said, she would not apologize for making it a good, long look once she got it. It was, after all, another drawing depicting _her_.

And Steve.

_And_ Barnes.

That's where things got interesting.


	2. Bucky and Peggy

_Bucky and Peggy_

Against all odds and just as Peggy had – irrationally, perhaps, but no less wholeheartedly – believed he would, Steve strode into camp unharmed and trailed by hundreds of tired and bedraggled yet elated men. Late. Dreadfully late. But alive to answer for the suffocating fist that had been tightening around her insides all this time, which was the important thing.

Telling the Colonel 'I told you so' would be disrespectful, but Peggy was confident he could feel her thinking it.

Soldiers streamed from the tents, cheers and cries of joy and triumph rose and rose, and Peggy allowed herself a brief flight of fancy. If they both lived to see the end of this wretched war, she would convince Steve to revise the self-portrait: give the monkey a pair of angel wings as well. Perhaps even redo it entirely. She was sure he would look dashing in, say, a sculpted breastplate and leather skirt.

While Colonel Phillips moved in on him, Peggy briefly caught the eye of the man standing to Steve's left and thought, _Aha_, barely surprised to be proven right. Two-legged, battered, dirt-encrusted, and far less baby-faced, but instantly recognizable: it was Steve's merman.

_That _is_ Sergeant Barnes, then._

**I-oOo-I**

And the long, long legs he walked in on notwithstanding, Sergeant Barnes was an actual, _literal_ mermaid.

Alright then.

_Alright then._

Except _for god's sake, Rogers._

Peggy had taken both drawings for symbolic – hero-worshipfully, mockingly, or whatever gradation of affectionately in-between. _Of course_ she had. The alternative was absurd. But no! In Barnes's case the _whole thing_ had been drawn from life, from the light and dark colors on his fish-tail flanks to the shape of his fins and the thin smattering of gleaming scales across his forearms.

"_You_," she said to Steve, astonishment dulling what wanted to be reprimand. "This is why –"

Barnes was falling to hysteria, babbling about vivisection and dire secrets and the safety of his family and others like them (by god, there were _more_), and Steve had drawn a pretty picture of the cause of his distress and left it lying around for anyone to see.

It was, perhaps, something she should talk to Steve about. But later. Not now, not when – _god_.

From there, it was surprisingly easy to... _dismiss_ what she was seeing, in a way. To focus on the problems the tail presented and how to solve them, and let the mad impossibility of the tail itself rest. Just because science had taken a momentous leap forward before her very eyes and field reports of Hydra weapons that evaporated men on the spot haunted their desks, did not mean every fairytale and urban legend in the world was suddenly, retroactively real. The countless reasons why they'd been relegated to the realm of myth in the first place still held true, so no, mermaids were _still_ not supposed to exist. But the cacophony of rejection in her head was so thick and impenetrable it pushed Peggy herself right out, like oil separating itself from water. Or, like a tub full of custard – because she could cross right over it, it was only a matter of _keep walking_ and she wouldn't sink an inch.

Her eyesight was impeccable, wasn't it? And then there was Steve, freshly returned from a gamble that, by all rights but theirs, should have ended with him dead and her court-martialed; Steve, confirming the Sergeant's claims with his every blink and breath.

Denial was unthinkable; problems were inevitable.

And problems were easy.

What to do about Barnes, in particular, was one; what to do with his existence in general was another. Knowing which took precedence? Not so much.

**I-oOo-I**

The next day, Peggy made notes and pursed her lips as Colonel Phillips and a medic with the right security clearance grilled Barnes.

"Do you _feel_ any different from before?" the doctor asked after all his actual tests had told him nothing out of the ordinary.

"I feel like shit," Barnes answered frankly, then shot Peggy a look. "Sorry."

"Oh no, go right ahead."

"Ma'am." He inclined his head and repeated to the doctor, not without a bit of bite, "I feel like shit."

The doctor was not amused. "No old ailments that have mysteriously disappeared?"

"If they don't feel even shittier than usual, they're being eclipsed by how shitty the rest of me feels."

"We didn't call you here for your cheek, Sergeant," the Colonel interrupted, even less amused.

"Sorry, sir," Barnes said.

Barnes did not look sorry.

"After his procedure, Captain Rogers only needed a moment to gather his bearings and hasn't felt unwell for a moment since," Peggy explained, because Barnes looked wound tight enough to snap and the medic was proving to have rather terrible bedside manner.

Barnes's expression mellowed minutely; the doctor had an epiphany.

"Did they use vita-rays?"

"Vita-whats?" Barnes asked.

"That's a negative then." The doctor scribbled something on his own clipboard, the gears in his head churning altogether too eagerly.

"Were you conscious for the entirety of the proceedings, Sergeant?" Peggy asked, aiming a disapproving stare at the oblivious doctor.

"...no," Barnes said reluctantly. "I – I'm pretty sure I lost time every time they –"

Realisation penetrated what must be a nightmarish fog of memories and he looked up at Peggy for confirmation, and then joined her in making scandalized faces at the doctor.

"So we have no way to establish a negative," Peggy translated. Barnes may have gotten it, but she had her doubts about the over-excited doctor. "And how's your grasp of German scientific jargon, Sergeant?"

"Non-existent, Ma'am."

"Even better."

The doctor gave her one of those looks that said _how dare you,_ and _what do_ you _know, you uppity broad_.

Bloody hell, please not _now_.

The doctor very deliberately turned his back to her. "We could stick him in the vita-ray machine, see if it activates anything lying dormant in his blood."

"Or the vita-rays could _kill_ him if there is no serum in his blood to react with!" Peggy said. "Have you forgotten everything Doctor Erskine told us about the procedure?"

"Everybody remembers just fine," Phillips snapped. "But there's also the matter of him effectively taking the future of our super soldier program to the grave to consider."

"And reviving the program is worth risking Sergeant Barnes's life?"

Phillips gave her, and Barnes, a hard look. "Captain Rogers just liberated four hundred men _and_ laid waste to a major Hydra war factory, on a _solo mission_. I didn't see the point in deploying just one enhanced soldier before, but I admit it, I was wrong. Their use, even individually, is far greater than what I imagined. I don't need an army of them, I just need more than _one_ of them. But Rogers's blood is all but useless to us. Every drop of serum we gave him activated and disappeared, and reverse-engineering the results is getting us nowhere fast. If there is even the slightest chance that what they pumped into the Sergeant will get us more super soldiers, even if it's _only_ the Sergeant himself, then yes, it's worth it."

"Do _I_ get a say in this?" Barnes asked.

Phillips made an impatient gesture. "Look, son, we're not sticking you in the oven just like that. But we are going to find out if we _can_ and whether we even _should_, and you _will_ cooperate with us to that end. You will tell us everything you remember, you will let us take all the blood samples we need, and once you've eaten and rested and are back on your feet, you will show us everything you've got behind your punches these days. And that's an order. We'll talk about the vita-ray machine if and when there's reason to. Understood?"

Barnes nor Peggy was stupid enough to argue.

"Yes, sir."

**I-oOo-I**

The worst part was that they both knew the Colonel was _right_.

"Ma'am, we can't let them examine the blood they took," Barnes said under his breath as they left the medical tent, side-by-side. He looked _wrecked_.

Peggy did not enjoy what she was about to say, but it had to be said. "Sergeant, the last time we talked about this, you were in a state. I want you to stop and think about it again, very carefully. You can either take your chances at being exposed as a – a –"

"Merman," he supplied with a press of the lips that wasn't quite a smile.

Surely that would sound less ridiculous with time?

"Yes." She met his eyes, her own mouth tight. "You either take the chance of being exposed as a merman, or at least a genetic deviant of _some_ kind, and you won't be left guessing as to the long-term effects on your health _quite_ so much. Not to mention that you could be aiding the war effort immeasurably. Or you can forego the risks to your kind, let the side-effects of whatever happened to you play out as they will, and not add your blood to the samples we took from Captain Rogers. The choice is yours. _Think carefully._ Is it _really_ worth it?"

His gaze drifted off across the camp, and beyond, to places unseen. "Before you met me, what was your impression of mermaids?"

"What's _anyone's_ impression of mermaids?" she sighed impatiently. "They were made up by our ignorant ancestors. Urban legends. Like brownies, or haunted houses. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who swears they've seen one, but there's never any proof."

"We work very hard to keep it that way, and we have to work harder every time humankind comes up with some new scientific innovation that might expose us someday," Barnes said. "Submarines, sonar? Amazing inventions, but they're costing _lives_ – especially now. There's only a couple hundred thousand of us around the world –"

Peggy's mouth went dry. _Only – ?!_ She'd been thinking in terms of _dozens_. _Maybe_ a hundred. Some small, manageable number that fit into a cove in Neverland.

"– so the risk of discovery is spread thin, but it's not non-existent. And once _one_ of us is discovered, _none_ of us will be safe. _Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives,_" he emphasized. "Put at the mercy of people who have feared and despised us for millennia."

A few hundred thousand hidden in the world's oceans, versus four hundred in a night, out of two and a half billion, in a war going on three years and counting with no end in sight. Oh, the joys of a world so rife with suffering it reduced such an unfathomable choice to a mathematical equation.

And neither option offered any more guidance than 'but what if?' – for either of them. Had Peggy been a more devout woman, she would have been praying even then that leaving the decision entirely in his hands was the right thing to do.

"You know what the difference is between a mermaid and a siren?"

Raising her eyebrows and blowing out a breath, Peggy considered that. "Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible?"

Barnes's nostrils flared. "_Good will_. One's a pretty girl flipping her hair on a rock, ready to do unspeakable things to herself to drain the sea from her blood and gain a soul the moment she meets a good Christian man; the other's a body-snatching, man-eating, home-wrecking, child-stealing monster descended from sinners who sold their soul to the devil during the great flood. Competition for humankind's place at the top of the food chain."

"So Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible."

"Yes, fine, Hans Christian Andersen and the Bible," Barnes huffed. Then he ran his hands down his face and took a deep breath to calm down. He shook his head, lips twisted in frustration. "Much as _some_ of us wish we could – though for most of us, it's the _last_ thing we want – we can't go and hide in the deep sea where no-one will ever even look for us. No more than people can go live at the top of Mount Everest. We're creatures of the coast, we're just not built for the kind of terrain that would let us be _safe_."

Barnes smiled, just barely.

"So we send out specialists, sentries, to establish human identies on land, and they dedicate their lives to obfuscating our existence. Make evidence disappear, discredit eye-witness accounts, provide reasonable alternatives to the fairytale explanation. They also make sure we have access to services that might give us away if we had to get them from outsiders."

Peggy's eyebrows shot up. "Like doctors?"

"Like doctors," Barnes confirmed, grinning.

"A third option," she said, all the pleasure that didn't make it to her mouth blazing in her eyes. "We switch the blood, give our doctors a batch from one of the other men in the factory, and send yours to your mermaid doctor."

"A compromise," Barnes amended. "It'll take longer for my guy to get results – probably a _lot_ longer – and he'd have to be made privy to at least _some_ classified information..."

But it was better than nothing.

**I-oOo-I**

Peggy falsified the blood samples, slipped the real deal to Barnes, affected her usual professional distance during his examinations, and didn't truly speak to him again until he joined her at the bar in the leave-me-alone corner of the Whip and Fiddle one night. She'd found him in this exact spot with Steve just a few days ago. He was more put-together than he'd been then: uniform straightened out, buttons shined, tie done up, hair neatly slicked, jaw smooth. It made him look younger, and it made the shadows still lingering beneath his eyes less pronounced – but the ones _in_ his eyes all the more.

"I should probably apologize," he said without preamble.

"Whatever for?"

"Pick something. Anything." Before she could do more than furrow her brow, he shook his head and laughed to himself. "I mean for my terrible pick-up lines the other night. Steve hadn't told me you two were..."

Peggy raised an eyebrow but otherwise restrained herself. "What?"

He studied her from the corner of his eye. "...testing the waters. I don't usually make the moves on my best friend's girl. Just wanna put that out there."

"Perhaps he didn't tell you we were anything because I'm _not_ his girl," Peggy said.

"Oh. Well, that's up to you, of course," he said, taken aback a bit.

Not what he'd expected? Steve must have been too embarrassed to mention Private Lorraine, then.

_Good._

Barnes took an ill-advised gulp from his drink, grimaced, and rubbed his eyes. "Geeze, what am I even..." Then he straightened his shoulders and looked her square in the eye. "The thing is, I've never seen him look at a woman the way he looks at you before, and I should have noticed it sooner."

Peggy looked away, lips pressed into a thin line.

Peggy thought, briefly, of catching Steve in the act and shooting him in the shield.

Peggy thought, even more briefly, of pulling Barnes in by the tie and sticking her tongue in his mouth the way that French resistance boy she'd blown off steam with last year had shown her, and asking in her driest voice if he'd ever seen Steve do _that_.

It would either make Barnes more observant, show Steve what it felt like, or both. It was also a twelve-year-old's idea of getting even, and would leave her with no self-respect to speak of.

Pity, really. Barnes's mouth looked like sin.

Apparently she'd been thinking longer than she thought, because suddenly Barnes spoke again, quietly:

"I was starting to think he just didn't have it in him, to be honest. But... turns out all it took was someone just as extraordinary as himself. I'd be happy if it was you. I really would."

Peggy let out an incredulous laugh. "Did Rogers put you up to this?"

"What?" he asked, looking surprised, as if he truly did not realise how dramatic his words had been. "God no, he'd die of humiliation if he found out I ever said any of this. Please don't tell him I said any of this."

Oh, _boys_.

Peggy quirked an eyebrow, not without some fondness. "More secrets?"

"Yeah, just put it on my tab along with everything else I owe you for," Barnes said with a wry smile.

"Don't mention it. Just please stop trying to hawk Captain Rogers off on me. His good qualities don't need selling, and his mistakes are his to correct."

He raised his glass in salute. "Gotcha."

For a while, they drank in silence. Barnes got a refill, then another, and then Peggy shook her head at the bartender and ordered him a water.

"You'll thank me later."

Barnes leaned against the bar and smiled warm and slow, all self-deprecating charm. "I keep trying to make up for the terrible first impression I made and failing."

"In the interest of full disclosure, you didn't make my first impression of you," Peggy said. "Captain Rogers did."

"Right, he's been talking about me."

"A time or two."

"Lies. All lies."

Barnes smiled. Peggy smiled back.

"Pity. He said you were one of the few to ever believe in him before Doctor Erskine, even though you had more reason than anyone not to, always coming to his defence. Said you even almost drowned once trying to protect him."

Barnes snorted. "I'm afraid that wasn't quite the brave deed it sounds like, seeing as I'm physically incapable of drowning and all."

"I can read between the lines, Sergeant. It sounds no less brave now than it did before."

He gave her a long and impenetrable look. Peggy used that time to firmly squash the urge to make this conversation All About The Tail. She was getting good at that.

"That explains a lot. Better get back in shape then." He cast his eyes down to his water, and his lips quirked into an almost-smile. "In my defence, that day back in Austria? Part of me was still convinced I was either dead, dying, or hallucinating. ...don't tell Steve I said that either."

She gave him a look he didn't meet. "If you want. For what it's worth, though, I really don't think he would think any less of you."

"Probably not. But I'd be one ungrateful bastard if I told him that him showing up and saving my life like that started feeling like a nightmare halfway through." He sighed, suddenly looking bone-tired. "All my life there's only been two things I was ever afraid of, and those forty-eight hours had both."

"I thought you said there was only one thing."

He let out a huff of a laugh. "Yeah, well, you try telling a guy like Steve that you lie awake at night worrying about his health, wondering if this is the year he'll finally catch something that will take him away from you."

"I should think you'd be dancing with relief, then," she said, voice carefully neutral.

"I didn't mean it like that." He sighed again, running a hand through his hair and leaning his elbows on the bar. "It's weird as hell that it happened so fast, but I'm happy for him. He's finally getting to be the man he always wanted to be. _Deserved_ to be. But... I could never keep him from getting _into_ trouble, but at least I could help get him _out_ of it. Buy medicine and beat up the guys beating on him. Smooth things over when a beautiful woman got him tongue-tied and he said something stupid because of it. You know? But I don't know what to do about –"

His mouth twisted and his nose scrunched up. All seriousness aside, Peggy had to take a moment to appreciate how adorably ridiculous Barnes looked when he got cranky.

"– demon Nazis. And guns that burn you to dust like _that_," he said, snapping his fingers. "I'm not a super soldier, that much is obvious. How do I get Steve out of trouble if I can't even keep up with him?"

"You'll find a way," Peggy said. "We all will. That's what the lot of us are here for."

"I'm damn well going to try, alright," Barnes said, and raised his water to her with a smirk like a challenge. "To the impossible –"

"– made possible," Peggy finished, clinking.

**I-oOo-I**

The answer, for Barnes, was many things, from his marksmanship and experience as an NCO to, one day – and gosh, whoever would have guessed – his gills.

No, really, Peggy had been _waiting_ for this. Not _actively_, granted, but for a subconscious expectation it was a very forceful one. Perhaps Steve and Barnes were so used to the fact that he was a merman that they had grown out of feeling like something would surely come of sooner or later, but for her it had been only a few months, and a few months of enforced silence to boot.

It was funny, really. In the past few years she'd gone from the WAAF to the SOE to the SSR, gathering and analysing and transporting intel, encrypting and decrypting messages between allies and enemies both, infiltrating Hydra strongholds, supervising top-secrets projects. But only now, when the secrets were personal, did she feel anything close to that sitting-on-a-bomb sensation she remembered from a memorable month or so of boarding school, exchanging awkward glances with Mary and Ethel across the classroom after walking in on them passionately snogging against a toilet stall.

At present, the Howling Commandos, Stark, Phillips and Peggy were studying the same maps and facts for the umpteenth time – the enemy base, the numbers stationed inside, the miles of flat, barren fields surrounding it on three sides, the armed watchtowers, the landmines, the steep plunge off a cliff and into the ocean on the fourth side...

"Sure is a shame," Barnes said slowly. "that those are occupied waters."

There was a decision in his voice, clear as day. Peggy was instantly and inappropriately excited.

"We're not getting any submarines down there, that's for sure," she said with utmost restraint.

"And according to surveillance, the search lights on those towers scan the water just as thoroughly as the land, so even a rowboat is out," Steve added, his voice just a smidgeon higher than normal.

"I could bring half that factory down into the ocean if I had a dozen heavy charges and the opportunity to place them in the right spots," Dernier muttered in French, running his gaze and his fingers across photographs of the cliffside as if in a trance. "Even easier if I could use that blue Hydra _boomsh_."

Jones translated for the monolinguals in the room.

They'd confiscated _so much_ blue Hydra boomsh from the last factory they took. The self-destruct mechanism had failed. Stark had cried and treated the entire division to the kind of drink only the filthy rich still had access to in this time of rationing.

Barnes planted an elbow on the table and his face in his hand, and looked at Steve and Peggy from beneath his eyelashes. Crossing his arms, Steve covered his mouth with his hand, half-mimicking Barnes, and Peggy picked up her empty teacup and bit down on the tin rim.

**I-oOo-I**

Steve and Barnes were already busily plotting when she slipped into Steve's private quarters later that night. Barnes's face was alight with the giddy nerves of someone about to do something utterly foolish yet incredibly exhilarating; Steve looked alternately worried and love-struck with awe. Peggy recognized the look. Usually she was the one on the other end of it.

Peggy knew it was at least in part her alacrity speaking, but god help her, she had never been more charmed by either of them.

"The hardest thing about this," she said by way of greeting. "will be coming up with an excuse that doesn't boil down to 'magic'."

Barnes took the folder she produced from inside her jacket and flipped it open. "Oh, that's easy. I dared Steve to do it and he did it. Who needs 'magic' when we have 'super soldier'?"

"I don't wanna walk away with the credit for something you did, Buck," Steve said, his face all scrunched up.

"Look at it this way: I take the credit, I get court-martialled. _You_ take the credit, you get off with a slap on the wrist."

"Nobody is getting court-martialled," Peggy clucked. "We're clearing this with the Colonel up front. We'll just be lying fit to burst about _what_ we're clearing."

"But then we'll _actually_ have to think of an explanation," Steve groaned. "Can't I just risk it? I've changed my mind, martyrdom sounds like fun."

Barnes's longsuffering look was a work of art.

"Have a seat," he told Peggy, vacating the room's only chair and settling opposite Steve on the bed instead. "This could take a while."

It took all night, as it turned out. Though admittedly, by the time Bigfoot came up as the perfect scapegoat, they'd long since abandoned all pretence of professionalism.

**I-oOo-I**

They waited until the moon was new. Steve manned the oars of a little rowboat they'd stashed away miles out of Hydra's detection range, and Barnes stuck his head into the water for a bit so that, with the night vision that let his kind see in the dark depths of the ocean, he could give Steve directions. Peggy fastened their lone thermographic device prototype over her eyes to watch their rear.

Once Steve stopped the boat, safely out of range of the factory lights, Barnes stripped down and geared up.

Peggy studied his silhouette from the corner of her eyes. Her own hands were an orange-tinged golden glow, while Steve's face and hands were warmer, gold inching towards white. Barnes had been orange where bare and dark gold where clothed, but as she watched him strap on the airtight pack – containing the explosives (all too willingly donated by Stark), a diagram of the cliff (commissioned from Dernier, vengeful _boomsh_ enthusiast that he was, with equal ease), a towel, a spare pair of boots and trousers, a flare, and a pistol – his chest and arms slowly cooled to red.

Then Barnes reached for his belt, and Peggy turned away entirely.

The boat rocked. There was a splash. When Peggy looked again, she frowned.

"Barnes?" She grabbed the edge of the boat and leaned over. "Barnes, where are you?"

"Right here."

A cold, wet hand wrapped around her wrist, and she sucked in a startled breath.

He was entirely blue, so dim and dark he was nearly invisible against the black of the night.

"What's the matter?" Steve asked.

"So cold," Peggy said wonderingly, turning her hand to clasp Barnes's wrist, fingers brushing alternating textures of skin and scales. It hadn't occurred to her until now. And she certainly hadn't expected the transformation to be over so quickly.

"What, you mean his toes?"

Barnes splashed Steve in the face.

"Incredible," Peggy dryly, squeezing Barnes's hand once before pulling back. "But let's get to business, shall we?"

"Right."

"Right."

"One last time for luck: Barnes, you swim over underwater, dry yourself off on one of the rocks where the search lights don't reach, climb the cliff to plant the charges where Dernier indicated, swim back to us, and once you're safely in the boat we detonate the charges from here. If you encounter trouble, you light the flare and Steve will swim after you while I radio for reinforcements. No dawdling, no heroics."

"Other than what you're already doing," Steve said.

"Butter me up some more, I'll slip-n-slide right off that cliff."

"_Ahem. _No dawdling, no heroics. In the unlikely event that you encounter something that casts doubt on the desirability of this mission's completion or the means of its completion, you have the last call on how to proceed while you're there. Clear?"

"Clear," Steve and Barnes echoed.

"Go get 'em," Peggy said.

She could just make out Barnes's head turn toward Steve. Thermographic vision didn't let her make out their expressions, and Steve was as good as blind in this level of darkness even with his enhanced vision, but she could imagine their faces in that moment. They even _looked_ at each other like Mary and Ethel had; joint keepers of a beautiful and terrible secret, and bound together all the tighter for it.

(The one big difference was that with Mary and Ethel, Peggy had at least known beforehand that such things really happened. Nobody liked to talk about uncle Freddie, but uncle Freddie _loved_ talking about 'uncle' John.)

"See you in a jiffy," Barnes said, and disappeared underwater.

And Peggy and Steve were left behind to wait.

"So, how does a merman end up on the streets of Brooklyn?" Peggy asked after about thirty seconds of silent bobbing.

The golden blob of light that was Steve (she would not think of that as fitting, no sir) turned to face her. "Shouldn't you be asking _him_ that?"

"My mother taught me it's rude to pry."

He cocked his head and said, a smile in his voice, "It's rude to pry Bucky, but not me?"

"Is it as sensitive a subject for you as it is for him?"

She saw his body shake with silent laughter. "Devious."

Peggy smiled into the dark. "Devious implies unsavoury intent. I think I prefer 'tactful'."

"Don't worry about prying," Steve said. "Worry about how to shut him up once you've got him started. He loves getting to talk about it, and showing it off. He rarely ever gets to be himself that way, so..."

He shrugged.

"It must be difficult," Peggy mused. "And for what? I only got a glimpse before, but it was..."

"Beautiful," Steve finished simply. "And I'm not ashamed to say so. But not everybody sees it that way. One of Bucky's sisters, Rebecca, had a fella a couple years back, and he asked her to marry him. She'd've loved to, but she wanted him to know the truth before they did. At first he seemed fine with it, but eventually he started acting... weird. Nasty and paranoid. He stopped listening to her and started sending letters to occultists and exorcists. Rebecca thought –"

Steve looked away, and even through the thermographic device Peggy could see his face twist.

"What did they do to him?" Peggy asked.

Steve's head shot up. As if he hadn't expected her to see exactly where this was going.

"Rebecca and the others convinced him he'd imagined the whole thing. His friends and family had noticed his change in behaviour too, so it was... relatively easy... to convince them he was headed for a psychological breakdown. They'd invite him over to Sunday dinner at the family home and all compliment Mrs Barnes on her carrot soup when she'd served pea soup to confuse him. That sort of thing. And with everyone telling him the mermaid thing was crazy, he eventually started believing it himself. They broke off the engagement and he went to stay with family in another state. Work on the farm for a while. 'Clear his head.'"

"Charming."

"It wasn't pretty," Steve agreed grimly. "And that's one of the better outcomes when things to south. You should hear the stories Bucky's mom can tell. When _she_ told her future husband, she set him up to be suspected of her murder if he tried anything funny."

What would James Barnes have done to _her_, Peggy wondered, if _she_ had presented herself as a threat?

"Bucky says most mermaids, whether they grew up on land or in the water, just don't bother with humans who don't already know. Who would voluntarily _want_ to put themselves in that position? Especially with someone they love?"

What would _Steve_ have done?

"I don't mean to frighten you, Peggy," Steve said softly. "Or to imply that Bucky and his family are –"

"You have neither frightened me nor implied a thing, Steve," Peggy said with perfect honesty. "I understand completely."

In weary, bloodied moments, she sometimes looked at the undercurrent of perpetual caution, of hostility, and even of physical force, running through her own life and relationships – with peers and superiors and subordinates, with _friends _and _family_ – and had a hard time remembering why she thought it was worth it. Wondered when she'd come to think of punching an _ally_ in the nose for some crass words as a perfectly reasonable and unremarkable course of action. What it said about her that discovering an exceptional aptitude for all manner of violence and dishonesty was the best thing that had ever happened to her. But Peggy's struggle was a decision she had made, and her ambitions, her desire for respect, were things she could – or so she kept being told – give up if she ever felt the price had become too steep. For Barnes, the choice wasn't so simple.

It might be unfair to call it a choice at all.

"I –" Steve started. "Wait, where are the binoculars? I think he's reached the cliff."

**I-oOo-I**

Watching Barnes from afar, trying to spot him in the faint, fleeting, infrequent illumination of close-passing search lights, was nerve-wracking. Nothing like the threat of death or (re)capture to drive home how attached you've grown to a man.

"If we pull this off he deserves a medal," Steve said grimly. He seemed very keen on that general sentiment.

"We'll bake him a cake," Peggy muttered.

"You bake?"

"Badly."

"So I'll bake him a cake while you supervise, is what you're saying."

"Exactly."

Steve grumbled something unintelligible.

"He doesn't like your cooking?" Peggy guessed.

"I'm pretty sure he just pretends to. _I_ don't like my cooking."

"If public recognition is what you're after, covert operations are not the way to go, Steve."

"I know that," Steve sighed.

"And so does he."

"It's just not fair. I blow up a Hydra base, they give me a Medal of Honor. He blows up a Hydra base, he gets more lies to keep track of."

Peggy only murmured an absent, "Hell of a way to live." She might have engaged or looked over at him, but it was her turn with the binoculars and she was starting to grow concerned with how long it had been since she'd last glimpsed Barnes.

Steve was silent for a while.

"It's all backwards," he said eventually. "It used to be Bucky who was... just... _better_ at everything. At first it was great to feel like I imagined he always did, but you get used to it surprisingly quickly. Now it's just _weird_. I know it's selfish to think of it that way when I was given the serum for the sake of the war effort, but every now and then it just... I never wanted to be better than Bucky. Only as good as."

Steve paused.

"I'm being ridiculous, aren't I?"

"A bit." Peggy smiled into the dark. "But I think I speak for the both of us when I say you're forgiven."

"You do," Barnes's voice came from behind them.

Peggy and Steve jumped a mile.

And screamed. Let's not forget the screaming.

"For god's sake, Barnes!" Peggy hissed furiously. The binoculars were gone. She hoped they'd fallen in the boat.

"Bucky, we are right under Hydra's nose, what the hell are you thinking?!" Steve added.

Barnes wasn't thinking; he was wheezing with suppressed laughter. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

He never did sound sorry when he said that.

"How long have you been here?" Peggy demanded.

"You'll never know." He threw his pack into the boat, and they listed slightly to the side as he put his weigh on the edge. "Charges planted. Let's light 'em up."

"If we weren't accomplices, I would write you up myself," Peggy promised, one hand pressed to her racing hart as she felt around for the detonator with the other.

Steve exhaled noisily. "Get in the boat, Buck."

"Actually, I think I'll stay here and swim to shore alongside you. Stretch my fins while I can."

Fine. Saved her the trouble of trying not to kick him.

The detonation was deafening, blinding, and even more effective than Stark and Dernier had predicted. Bye bye, Hydra airborne division. They cheered, they clapped each other on the back, and then they departed the scene in silence, because 'deafening' was not hyperbole.

**I-oOo-I**

While Peggy and Steve moored their little boat by the light of a single lantern, Barnes hoisted himself onto the landing pier.

"My mother..." he started, and Peggy, over her shoulder, got her first glimpse of his aquatic form since that day in the woods; gleaming and shadow-cast, eyes lit up like a cat's with the light of fire on the horizon. "– is this weird blend of a pessimist and an idealist. She believes that discovery is gonna get us all killed, but she also taught me and my sisters that if one of us ever comes across a human in need of our help, we should _always_ save them from the sea."

("Bucky took after his mom most," Steve would tell Peggy one day. "Soldiering was his father's thing. Career military. Mr Barnes would've been so proud of him for coming here, if he'd lived to see it. But Bucky was always his mother's son through and through.")

"They must be drowning by the dozens out there," Barnes said. "And I just don't care."

**I-oOo-I**

War: one moment you celebrated like the explosions were fireworks, the next, reality snapped back into place to remind you that in any other place, at any other time, what you'd done would be called a massacre.

Then you remembered the special brand of despicable fanatics that made up the Hydra ranks, all the air raids you'd prevented, all the ground your forces would be able to reclaim now, and celebrating sounded pretty damn good again. At least for a while. (Just a while.) They told their lies and paid their dues and played their parts through the aftermath, and later, in London, they all stepped out to get jolly sloshed together.

When they raised their first drink in a toast to Barnes, he asked, "So, Margaret, are you gonna start calling me Bucky yet or what?"

"But James, that's such a silly name," Peggy lamented with a smile.

"James who? I'd like to think you were talking to me, but for every ten guys in a room there's always three Jameses, so I never know."

"She meant Monty," Steve assured him.

"Morita, actually."

Bucky it was, then. She wasn't honestly sure why she'd held off thinking of him that way for so long in the first place.

When they called it a night, Steve led them through the SSR corridors with Bucky's arm around his shoulders on one side and Peggy's around his waist on the other. Because Peggy and Bucky were wobbly-drunk and Steve was not. (He couldn't _get_ drunk anymore. Poor dear. They'd toasted his loss liberally.) Because Peggy and Steve were in love and Bucky and Steve were like brothers, and Steve's hugs were divine. Because there was no-one watching. Because why the hell not?

"I jus' had the greadest idea," Bucky slurred, and swung himself around to face Steve and throw his other arm around Peggy's shoulders. "We make a goo'team, right? The tree ov us?"

"Yeah, Buck," Steve said. "The best."

His smile was soft and wistful, and his arm tightened around Peggy's waist. Melting into the contours of Steve's body, she hummed her own agreement as well.

"Thought so," Bucky murmured.

And he reached up higher, weaving his fingers into Steve's hair. Pulled him in to press a lingering kiss to his cheek.

Peggy let out a trembling breath.

A single chaste, sloppy display of Bucky's mouth working, and her mind went blank and her body flared hot with desire. Right. _That_ was why she'd held off thinking in first name terms for so long.

Then he turned toward _her_, and tilted her face up to his, and when the distance between his lips and her cheek was mere inches yet something _clicked_, and Peggy stiffened and thought _oh no_. But Bucky's eyes had already slipped shut, blind to her alarm. Peggy was really rather drunk, so the only thing that came to mind was to raise her hand and let him plant his face in that instead of – judging from his ill-plotted trajectory – her ear.

And he did.

Bucky jerked back, sputtering and wide-eyed with confused surprise.

"No!" Peggy squawked.

Bucky froze.

Bucky looked at her, at Steve, at her, at Steve again. If there had been any doubt in her mind as to the nature of his 'great idea', it was obliterated by the stricken look Barnes sent Steve as he yanked his hands away from both of them and launched himself backwards.

And suddenly they were all staring at one another in horrified realisation.

Bucky and Steve, close as brothers.

Peggy and Steve, in love.

And Peggy and Bucky...

Oh _no_.

"Right," Barnes said thickly. "No. Right. I should. _Leave._"

He pointed a finger in the direction of his quarters, then his feet, then –

"Wait," Steve croaked, looking frantically between Barnes and Peggy, his face twisted in pained, wide-eyed disbelief. "Wait, we –"

Barnes fled.

"Bucky!"

Peggy grabbed the hand Steve raised, halting his pursuit in its tracks.

"Leave him," she said. "He's drunk, he's saying nonsense. He's drunk. And so am I. Walk me to my room, Steve."

She felt stone-cold sober.

**I-oOo-I**

"Look, it was inappropriate and I ap –"

"I don't want your apologies," Peggy interrupted, both her hangover and her other throbbing source of misery locked down under inches of steel. "You were drunk. But I think we both know you were also honest."

He didn't deny it.

"Listen carefully, Barnes, because I will say this only once. I am not some whore available to every man in this division. I am not a piece of meat to be passed around between a man and his best mate whenever they fancy a tryst. And I will _not_ be the object of a love triangle."

Barnes's face emptied of all emotion.

"_I am off-limits to you._ I don't care what's gotten into you, what insecurities or growing pains or territorial disputes between yourself and Steve you thought to relieve with this. You do not jeopardize my position here. You do not compromise the functioning of our division. Meaning, _you do not make the moves on your best friend's girl_."

_Or else_ hung in the air between them, unspoken but unmistakable.

What would James Barnes do to her if she presented herself as a threat?

What would Margaret Carter do to _him_ if _he_ presented himself as a threat?

(And they called _Steve_ dramatic.)

"Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"Then the remainder of our acquaintance should be perfectly pleasant," Peggy said with a sharp, pointed smile. And she turned on her heel, leaving him to stare stonily into the shadows of the empty office.

**I-oOo-I**

After all the risks she'd taken on his behalf –

_I took a chance with you, Agent Carter, and now America's golden boy and a lot of other good men are dead. 'Cause you had a __**crush**__._

A lot of good men dead because you had a crush.

A lot of good men dead because you had a crush.

A lot of good men dead because you had a crush.

Captain America and lot of other good men dead because you had a _crush_.

**I-oOo-I**

Barnes was as good as his word, though. Thank god.

("I didn't puke on your shoes or something, did I?" he'd groaned, lowering himself ever so gingerly into his seat. "I don't remember going home last night."

Steve had looked pained for just a moment before he could muster up a strained smile. "Nah, worst you did was drool.")

_Thank god._

**I-oOo-I**

Peggy found the second drawing, too, by accident. There was a map she needed stuck in Steve's sketchbook and, since he might have been using the map to mark a spot, she opened the book some, intent on finding something else to stick in it.

Her eye immediately fell on a pair of cartoony little wings. Then a pair of fins waving through the air.

Steve had been drawing them again. _Both_ of them.

That's where things got interesting, and not in a good way. The drawing was signed and dated – dated to almost a month _before_ Barnes's drunken slip.

Betrayal spread like fire from the roots of Peggy's hair to the tips of her fingers.

Exactly _whose_ dirty little fantasy had Barnes spilled that night?

She threw the little book down, acutely disgusted, and –

Wait.

She picked it back up.

The ape in the middle. The merman over one shoulder and the angel over the other.

_The ape_ in the _middle_.

A hundred little details turned sideways all at once, and suddenly the picture they painted was something else entirely. The young girl or the old crone? The faces or the vase? The duck or the rabbit?

From _this_ angle, the love triangle looked to be configured very differently.

From this angle it looked so much worse.


End file.
